. . . In the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influence of a variety of later psychological forces. Thus the “childhood memories” of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of “screen memories”and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.

A POLYPHONY OF VOICES RISES up from every new history of the past. Who is speaking? What is being spoken? Who is listening, and from what vantage? How do we reconstruct public, personal, or invisible histories? Resurrections and reconstructions of the past are a culture industry all to themselves, and they are matched by a diffuse reactionary nostalgia for the past that often